NYT: U.S. knows exactly where ISIS headquarters is, but doesn't attack for fear of accidentally killing civilians

You'd think it would represent a major blow to ISIS if you could take out its headquarters - and apparently U.S. forces know exactly where ISIS headquarters is located. Specifically we're talking about seven buildings in Raqqa, Syria. Furthermore, you'd think that if you had a shot at thousands of ISIS terrorists - the very ones who just took Ramadi and were running around in the open flaunting it - you'd take them out.

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You'd think that, but you'd be wrong, at least according to the Obama Administration's best friends at the New York Times:

American and allied warplanes are equipped with the most precise aerial arsenal ever fielded. But American officials say they are not striking significant — and obvious — Islamic State targets out of fear that the attacks will accidentally kill civilians. Killing such innocents could hand the militants a major propaganda coup and alienate both the local Sunni tribesmen, whose support is critical to ousting the militants, and Sunni Arab countries that are part of the American-led coalition. But many Iraqi commanders, and even some American officers, argue that exercising such prudence is harming the coalition’s larger effort to destroy the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or Daesh, and that it illustrates the limitations of American air power in the Obama administration’s strategy. A persistent complaint of Iraqi officials and security officers is that the United States has been too cautious in its air campaign, frequently allowing columns of Islamic State fighters essentially free movement on the battlefield. “The international alliance is not providing enough support compared with ISIS’ capabilities on the ground in Anbar,” said Maj. Muhammed al-Dulaimi, an Iraqi officer in Anbar Province, which contains Ramadi. “The U.S. airstrikes in Anbar didn’t enable our security forces to resist and confront the ISIS attacks,” he added. “We lost large territories in Anbar because of the inefficiency of the U.S.-led coalition airstrikes.” It appears that Islamic State troops are taking advantage of restrictions on how the coalition carries out its bombing campaign, with militants increasingly fighting from within civilian populations to deter attack.

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In Iraq, more than 80 percent of the allied airstrikes are supporting Iraqi troops in hotly contested areas like Ramadi and Baiji, the home of a major oil refinery. Many of the other strikes focus on so-called pop-up targets — small convoys of militants or heavy weaponry on the move. These have been a top priority of the campaign, even though only about one of every four air missions sent to attack the extremists have dropped bombs. The rest of the missions have returned to the base after failing to find a target they were permitted to hit under strict rules of engagement designed to avoid civilian casualties. In Syria, the United States has a very limited ability to gather intelligence to help generate targets, although the commando raid there this month that killed a financial leader of the Islamic State may signal a breakthrough. Many Islamic State training compounds, headquarters, storage facilities and other fixed sites were struck in the early days of the bombing, but the military’s deliberate process for approving other targets has frustrated several commanders. “We have not taken the fight to these guys,” the pilot of an American A-10 attack plane said in a recent email. “We haven’t targeted their centers of gravity in Raqqa. All the roads between Syria and Iraq are still intact with trucks flowing freely.” These critics describe an often cumbersome process to approve targets, and they say there are too few warplanes carrying out too few missions under too many restrictions. “In most cases, unless a general officer can look at a video picture from a U.A.V., over a satellite link, I cannot get authority to engage,” the A-10 pilot said, referring to an unmanned aerial vehicle, or drone, and speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid punishment from his superiors. “It’s not uncommon to wait several hours overhead a suspected target for someone to make a decision to engage or not.” This really shows you something about the Obama Administration's nerve in blaming the Iraqis for losing Ramadi to ISIS. They're so concerned about giving ISIS a propaganda victory by maybe causing some unintended collateral damage, they're making it almost impossible for our forces to use the one type of power - air power - Obama will even consider as a method of aiding our allies' fight on the ground. This reeks in a classic way of Vietnam, when the Johnson Administration imposed so many restrictions on the nature of the fighting, U.S. forces couldn't take advantage of real opportunities to defeat the enemy. I guess this is what you get when you let Democrats lead a war effort. What's sickeningly ironic here is that the propaganda victory Obama fears handing ISIS is the very one he and his left-wing allies used to great effect against the Bush Administration during the Iraq War. Of course you don't take civilian casualties lightly, but you can't be so fearful of them that you don't fight to win. That's made more complicated, of course, by the fact that you know your political opponents will use every example of collateral damage to attack the war effort on the home front. Obama is holding back the real power the U.S. could be using against ISIS because he doesn't want ISIS to do to him what he did to Bush. It would be deliciously ironic if not for the fact that ISIS is cutting off heads, burning people alive, etc. And we're not doing everything we can to stop it. The New York Times, which we rip to shreds on a regular basis around here, deserves credit for reporting this story. We'll be the first to give it. Let's hope the rest of the media don't let the White House and the Pentagon off the hook for the way they're bungling this entire effort and making it easier for ISIS to run rampant over Iraq and Syria - and threaten the rest of the region as well. Obama recognized that cutting and running from the Middle East was a political winner for him, but as is so often the case, it's a strategic disaster for the U.S. and the people of that region.

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